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All too often, the phrase "corporate free press" is something of an oxymoron. Whether to maximise sales, to attract advertisers, or simply to promote the interests of their wealthy owners, the mass media open strange, self-serving and grossly distorted windows onto the world.

This website is another window. Here you'll find documentaries, lectures and interviews following a different editorial line.

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Archive for the ‘vietnam’ Category

Want a true account of what happens in war? Look no further than “Winter Soldier” a documentary of interviews with Vietnam veterans.

“I would kill anyone I could whether they were innocent or not just to make sure I wouldn’t get killed and that was my philosophy. If I’d go into a village and I’d have to kill a hundred people just to make sure there was no one there to shoot me when I walked out thats what I did.” Trailer

One of the most powerful documentaries I’ve seen.

“These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands now, deserves the thanks of man and woman.” Thomas Pain

Wintersoldier.com: Winter Soldier documents the “Winter Soldier Investigation” conducted by Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) in Detroit, Michigan in the winter of 1971. A call went out from VVAW to veterans all over the country saying, in effect, ‘everyone is talking about the war that you know from the inside. If you want to have anything to say about it, come to Detroit and tell it like you saw it.’ At the investigation, over 125 veterans representing every major combat unit to see action in Vietnam, gave eye-witness testimony to war crimes and atrocities they either participated in or witnessed. The purpose of the investigation was to bring to light the nature of American military policy in Vietnam.

In the sixties too, the U.S. was engaged in an unpopular, unjustifiable and ultimately unwinnable war. Then, a whole generation of young men were drafted to fight, to die, and to kill in Vietnam. This is the story (50 mins) of how those young men said “no”.

Hollywood eventually made a few excellent anti-war films about Vietnam, but even the best of these focussed on the suffering of American troops. Even today, the Vietnamese people are excluded from the mainstream narrative of the war. This 1 hour film by Mickey Grant is intended to rectify that imbalance (h/t RadicalFilms.co.uk).

Compiled from Vietnamese eyewitness testimony and archival footage shot by Viet Cong cameramen (to whose memory the film is dedicated), it tells of the network of tunnels that linked the villages of Cu Chi and in which the resistance movement created an underground society, complete with music, theatre and rudimentary military hospitals allowing them to fight and win a guerrilla war against the world’s most powerful army.

What better way to inaugurate this new blog than with John Pilger’s address (44 mins) to the recent Chicago Socialism Conference? Drawing upon his own vast experience, Pilger pulls no punches in this comprehensive account of how the media helps promote the agenda of Empire, covering up and normalising some of the 20th century’s worst crimes.